Set in Australia in the 1840s, A Fringe of Leaves combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision.

Returning home to England from Van Diemen's Land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of Australian Aboriginals, along with the rest of the passengers and crew.
In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties – to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

'In his major post-war novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual's quest for 'meaning and design' can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in contemporary Western prose'The Sunday Times